


And it can go on like this for many years // without the house falling down

by JoCarthage



Category: Roswell New Mexico (TV 2019)
Genre: Angst and Feels, Character Study, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Geology, Multi, Positive portrayal of 2x6 airstream scene, ambiguous ending for poly relationship, confirmed Michael/Maria at the end, mentions of Mimi's memory issues, mentions of reality-typical racism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-06
Updated: 2021-02-06
Packaged: 2021-03-18 19:08:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,459
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29248554
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JoCarthage/pseuds/JoCarthage
Summary: It started with a little bit of quartz Maria had found on a hike. She slipped it under some blankets in the back of Michael’s truck senior year. She figured it probably fell out and got lost the next time he unfurled his sleeping bag.She couldn’t do much for the kid, not with Alex and her Mom and Rosa and Liz and everyone else to take care of. But she had carried the little crystal around with her for weeks, starting when Michael’s face started getting thinner when they closed the cafeteria for 2 weeks for repairs and told everyone to just bring bagged lunches from home. She’d held it in her fist when she’d seen him jiggling the vending machine just right to get an extra helping of Oreos. She’d let its rough edge dig into her palm when she’d realized he was going to flunk a test she knew he’d have aced, except Isobel said he was missing class because his truck broke down.Maria at 17 couldn’t do a lot for Michael Guerin.But she did what she could.
Relationships: Maria DeLuca/Michael Guerin, Maria DeLuca/Michael Guerin/Alex Manes
Comments: 18
Kudos: 33
Collections: Maria DeLuca Healing Crystals Celebration





	And it can go on like this for many years // without the house falling down

**Author's Note:**

> This is part of the “Maria’s Healing Crystals” Write-Along, thank you Tas for organizing!
> 
> Title from the poem “A Marriage”by Michael Blumenthal: https://tracybaines.co.uk/marriage-holding-ceiling/
> 
> I’ve been looking for this poem for like 7 years, since it was read at my Uncle’s wedding. I love it in its simplicity and truth.
> 
> This is my first time writing Maria's POV and first time writing Miluca, so please be gentle. I got some unhinged anti-Maria comments on my vid yesterday, so now I'm following the practice most other writers in this fandom have to use to undercut the tiny segment of the fandom dedicated to misogynoir, and restricting comments to registered users. I appreciate all readers, and feel bad that well-meaning Anons can't comment, but I don't like dreading my inbox.
> 
> To make the tags explicit here: if you're not comfortable with the 2x6 Airstream scene, don't want to read about Michael and Maria, don't want to read something that focuses on Maria, this is probably not the fic for you. 
> 
> Also, if you only like to read depictions of women of color written by people of color or only like to read depictions of Maria by people practiced in portraying her POV, then since I'm a white woman writing Maria for the first time, this fic is probably not going to be to your tastes.
> 
> That being said, I love rocks and I love Maria DeLuca and I hope you enjoy this fic!

It started with a little bit of quartz Maria had found on a hike. She slipped it under some blankets in the back of Michael’s truck senior year. She figured it probably fell out and got lost the next time he unfurled his sleeping bag.

She couldn’t do much for the kid, not with Alex and her Mom and Rosa and Liz and everyone else to take care of. But she had carried the little crystal around with her for weeks, starting when Michael’s face started getting thinner when they closed the cafeteria for 2 weeks for repairs and told everyone to just bring bagged lunches from home. She’d held it in her fist when she’d seen him jiggling the vending machine _just_ right to get an extra helping of Oreos. She’d let its rough edge dig into her palm when she’d realized he was going to flunk a test she knew he’d have aced, except Isobel said he was missing class because his truck broke down.

Maria at 17 couldn’t do a lot for Michael Guerin. 

But she did what she could.

\--

The first time Maria heard Michael had gone to jail she picked up a sliver of blood red sandstone. She carried around in her back pocket, letting it poke her when she leaned over to set topped-off pints for handsy men and fluttery, fruity things for the Bridge Club crew. She liked the stone’s texture, its shape -- and she liked its story the most.

The books her Mom gave her told her sandstone is formed by roving sand dunes, each stripe, each line the edge of a different dune. When she and Mimi had hiked Antelope Canyon in Navajoland, the guide had said each line in the rock took 500 to 1000 years to form. 

She hoped whatever patience it took the rock to make itself whole like that might rub off on Michael.

This one she wedged under the front wheel of his Airstream while he was repairing her truck, to give it the greatest possible chance to influence him.

She couldn’t keep him out of jail, couldn’t keep him fed, but maybe she could help him find his patience again.

\--

When Max and Isobel held their all-out 21st birthday party at the Wild Pony -- Mimi and Maria had brought in a mechanical bull and a full karaoke set-up on Ann Evans’s card -- Maria had, well, she’d kept an eye out for Michael. But he never came.

She worried. She knew he shared the twins’ birthday, had seen Isobel slipping him cake at her party after school in some Tupperware. She’d seen Isobel Evans pulling him down to kiss the swirl of curls on the top of his head. He’d half wriggled away from Isobel in teenaged boy disgust at softness and half leaned into her, a look of such hunger on his face she spent the next week looking to see if they were secretly dating. She’d concluded not.

But that was all 3 years gone past and so were Liz, Rosa, and Alex. Her Mom was going to, but in a different way. Mimi had nearly muffed the delivery of the mechanical bull because she’d missed the drop-off time by an hour and a half; it was only because Maria had been on site and bribed the delivery man with a case of beer to let her sign off on receipt that the whole thing hadn’t fallen apart.

In her less worthy moments, Maria wished her Mom would leave her, the way everyone else had. Or, she wished she could let her Mom go, rely on her to manage her own life, so Maria could manage hers. But the thing was: she couldn’t. If Maria didn’t run her Mom’s calendar, she wouldn’t get to work on time; if she didn’t follow-up with doctors, her Mom wouldn’t get help for whatever horrible unnamed thing was happening to her.

And through all of this Michael -- Michael had been a break. A sweet smile; a habit of picking fights with the kind of people Maria wished she could throw out of her bar, and promised herself once it _was_ her bar she’d kick out in a hot minute. He’d grown into the bones of his nose, his hands (well, one of them), his shoulders. Oh, his shoulders. She’d thought about those shoulders, what it would be like to hang onto them, watch work as she slicked her way inside him with the strap-on she’d bought herself for her birthday when she realized no one else was going to buy her any presents. When she was exhausted at the end of a long shift, she even thought about just resting her head on his shoulder as he slumped down beside her against the bar.

When she didn’t see him at the birthday party, she started to plan. He needed something to remind him about aging and things that last, about connective tissue and the proper order of time. _You can’t go forgetting birthdays, or you lose track of whole years._

So one Sunday morning, when there was an empty seat at the bridge table set-up in the back of the bar, and Marsha O’Neal had run through her stake and another of the ladies had had to leave suddenly, Maria made sure she was nearby to be offered a seat. 

Marsha grinned as Maria got settled at the green-topped card table: “It may be a short game, I’m all out.”

“I take trade -- Max can spend a few hours hauling boxes for me,” Maria said with a smile.

Marsha chuckled and then her eyes lit up, glancing between her table partners conspiratorially: “I do have something; it’s not cash though.”

Maria half expected her to pull out an edible snuck over the border from Colorado; but instead, she reached into her purse, unzipped a little pocket, and pulled out a hunk of white something, setting it square in the middle of the card table.

“That,” Marsha said, “is the finger bone of a ‘coelophysid theropod’,” she pronounced the name carefully. “From the 1980 Ghost Ranch dig.” She reached over, turning it carefully so the curve of it caught the spare sunlight creeping through the bar windows. “It’s the state dinosaur of New Mexico.”

“That works for me,” Maria said and the table agreed.

She had won the dinosaur bone, won enough money to take her Mom out for dinner a few times that month, and then lost the rest of it back so that the ladies who lunched would continue to brunch at the Pony.

It was a dusty piece of something, maybe Coelophysis, maybe just some petrified wood. But it _felt_ old when she slipped it between her fingers, carried it around in her boot, tucked high in her sock. She carried it for months, until Michael was soft-drunk at her bar, just soft enough to give her that smile she knew he saved for people he wasn’t trying to fuck or cheat. Then she slipped it in the pocket of his heavy jacket, thinking as hard as she could: _time passes no matter what but we can control if it counts._

\--

The first time Maria saw Michael Guerin cry, she dropped a piece of metamorphic rock she’d been saving for a hard occasion into the top of his boot while he wasn’t looking. She knew it would get caught up in the cuff of his pants, probably roll under his bed -- or the bed of whoever was making him look like that at 6pm on a Friday.

She’d had a rough day too; Alex had come home for a week only to tell her he’d re-upped, no matter how much she yelled and argued and tried to reason with him. _I need to bring something to the table, Maria_ , he kept saying, like his _self_ wasn’t good enough. _I need to have a career, to have money, so I can take care of the people I care about_. He’d given her this little soft, self-defeating smile and she’d wanted to pinch it right off his lips. The thing was, she _got_ it; God knew, she was saving up for this damn bar so she could do the same. But all she was dodging were handsy racists; Alex could be dodging bullets for all he knew. It seemed too high a price to pay, but there was always some variable with Alex, some hidden cost he was trying to cover, to hide from anyone knowing he was trying to plan for.

Alex was already on a bus back to Texas, then off to Alaska for six months while he got the rest of his college credits in order and then came back to the lower 48 for Officer Candidate School.

Michael was still here though and looked like someone he loved had just gotten hit by a truck. He had tucked himself into the darkest corner of the bar, staring down into his glass like if he just _wanted_ it enough, it would open a portal to another world, one where maybe his heart wasn’t breaking. 

He’d even paid up front for the night’s drinking with a crisp new $100 bill she had no idea where he’d gotten, but that he seemed in the worst kind of hurry to spend.

She’d gone over to refill his glass and he’d tried to give her what he probably thought was a flirty smile; but she could see where the tears had dried tracks on his skin and it made her heart ache. She kept her smile neutral and the first chance she got, she headed to the back room to get the green and black swirled marble-sized piece of rock out of her purse. When she next came by to refill his glass, she’d let it drop right into the top of his second-hand boots.

She hadn’t gotten a chance to carry it around for more than a few weeks, so it wasn’t carrying much of her in return, but the thing was, metamorphic rocks knew what they were about. They were layers and layers and layers of sand and silt and bits of plankton and dying whales, all drifting down to the bottom of shallow seas. And as the composition of the sand and silt and plankton and whales changed, the colors of what they became changed to, so each layer changed color, leaving the rock it formed covered in stripes. That lithified mass of sedimentary rock would sit there, as the seas filled and dried up, filled and dried up. Then time passes, continents roving and roiling and cracking down the middle. And sometimes, not often but sometimes, that sedimentary rock would get subsumed, pushed and pushed and pushed down by an opposing continent, in deep towards the mantle, the burning blood of the world. And most rock, it would meld, then melt, then become one with the magma that pulsed under every continent, every island, every mountain. 

But some rocks, they refused. The metamorphic rocks, they held onto what they were. And the thing was, heat and pressure changed them. Warped them. Made them more fragile -- sometimes, maybe, made them stronger. 

(She doubted that more and more every year.)

Metamorphic rocks were Mimi’s favorites because of the metaphors they suggested and because she could always pick them out. They had wiggly lines, like a plastic spatula left too long beside an open flame, left wrinkled and twist-handled by the contact, but still capable of flipping the odd burger or set of pancakes.

Maria liked that, the idea you could see do the work you needed to do, even if you weren’t the shape you were before, or a shape a younger version of yourself would even recognize. 

Growing up, every time they were out in the nature that was the only thing Maria consistently loved about New Mexico besides family, her Mom had always told her to pick up the rocks that caught her eye. When she could, she’d bought her books on geology, told her to get to know the earth: _It’ll give you better advice about how to live than most people you’ll meet_. Mimi had taught her to hold a bit of quartz or sandstone, a fossil or bit of metamorphic rock and -- well, the people who believed in her big earrings and layers of jewelry would call it ‘infusing the stone with intention.’ And maybe there was something like that happening. But it felt more like -- pouring her heart into the stones as she carried them. Her worries, her dreams, offsetting them, offloading them, into something far stronger, far older, and far less likely to shatter than she felt every day her mother got closer to forgetting her own name.

 _Put your worries in the rocks_ , Mimi had said. _They’re strong. They can bear them_.

\--

Maria kept a rock she’d picked up after the first time with Michael Guerin, out in the Texas dust. It was a little bit of pumice, washed down into the arroyo by a spring flood. It had caught itself in her blanket, all sharp edges and black shine. But, like all pumice, it had a lightness to it. The size of her thumb, after a bit of work, it was just the right size to soften her calluses in the bath, keep them from snagging on her hose or tearing in her sneakers.

She wondered, in those days before Noah’s funeral, if Michael might be like that. Lighter than he looked, maybe able to help her soften the hard parts of herself from the past 10 years of working and winning and losing and loving her Mom so hard she could hardly breathe. Help her choose what callouses to keep against a harsh world.

Turns out he’d kept something of hers too. But even when she’d told him off after he brought her necklace back, when he let the chain slide out of his fist, she just wanted to get it around her neck while it was still warm from his hands. Even after her shaky conversation with Alex, a part of her wanted that.

The thing was, she believed Alex’s shrugging over Michael about as far as she could toss him. But he was an adult man. He’d chosen to give his life to the Air Force, to leave, over and over again. When he told her Michael had been his Museum Guy, the rhythm of Michael’s life and sorrows and joys had started to make more sense.

Maria had seen Alex go after what he wanted, or thought he _should_ want, her entire life. He’d gotten the hair dye and the eyeliner, the job at the Emporium. He’d gotten himself into Officer Candidate School, gotten into the incredibly competitive career field he’d turned into his dream, his stable-something for the someone he wouldn’t name.

But he was still shit at finishing the _plan_. The _plan_ in high school had been working and saving money in Roswell, then running away to Memphis or LA or New York City. She’d be the lead singer on the posters, he’d be the soulful, grungy songwriter.

Then the _plan_ \-- as best as Maria could guess, because Alex had never _said_ \-- was Maria would scrounge and save and buy the Pony and Alex would do his two tours, make enough money, then come back, here, make a home with his secret somebody, and he and Maria could live out here and free and she’d get back to seeing the whole picture with him.

And now -- well, now Maria didn’t know what his plan was. He clearly had one, was playing some kind of 3D chess with his clusterfuck of a father, or maybe it was just playing chicken with hurt. But she had no idea where Michael fit into it and, as far as she could tell, _neither did Michael._

And the thing is: pumice requires _air_. It’s formed when magma touches oxygen and changes its name to lava; but even when the name changes, at first, none of its substance does. It’s the same below as above. But magma forms under immense pressure, and when that’s relieved, it gets lighter, airier. It, literally in the case of pumice, fills with air, explodes out into the world, covering entire plains with rocky black crumble-cake, crisping on the edges of lava flows, roiling down creek beds and into unsuspecting lovers’ blankets.

So, maybe, despite how much she loved him, Maria guessed that in Alex’s ideal world, the entire globe would stay cooking under pressure until he was ready for them to join him on the surface. And she loved him for it; she wished she could stop time, could control other people’s minds and hearts too. 

She couldn’t, though. She needed to breathe too; and so did Michael. And if Alex was going to tell her, lie to her, to her face, and say it was no big deal? Well, it was his life. She’d learned that loving and managing people were different jobs; she’d learned to set boundaries, manage her own slice of the pie and let others manage theirs.

It didn’t mean she didn’t shake salt over Alex’s shoulder the next chance she got, to try to break that haunted look he’d taken to wearing around. It didn’t mean she stopped giving him space to tell her more, to let her into his plans. It didn’t stop him being her best friend.

But it meant she didn’t wait for the salt to work, before she decided what she wanted.

\--

Maria kept a disk of petrified wood in the glove compartment of her truck. She and her Mom had gotten it on a road trip to the Petrified National Forest, just over the border in Arizona, on one of the free weekends she’d given herself after training Max Evans up as a good enough bartender to handle an entire weekend with just him Marsha’s boy for help.

The national forest there was _incredible_. Rainbow stumps filled with water and sluiced by a millennia of mud turned cobalt blue and blood red and harsh pink and shimmering chocolate and wrinkled grey and a green so vibrant it nearly hummed. Sand hills and mountains in deep blues and pale turquoise in the Painted Desert under the low and shifting clouds.

And, damn it, but all weekend, every flash of cresting iridescence in the stone reminded her of the alien’s handprints that Rosa had told her about; every cave they clambered past while out on the trails left her wondering if there were some kind of eggs -- Rosa called them _pods_ \-- deep down in the belly of the earth beneath her feet.

In the gift shop, before she and Mimi headed home, she’d bought a disk of rainbow petrified wood. As big as her palm, it lit up light stained glass when she put the light behind it.

She told Mimi it was because it reminded her how even mud, after long enough, can show its true colors and become beautiful. To herself, she knew it was also because it reminded her how dead things can live in the brightest colors you’ve ever seen, if you give them a chance. 

And when she and Michael and Alex were careening down a desert highway, desperate to get back to someplace safe enough to tend whatever wound Alex thought he was so manfully hiding, but that she could _smell_ , she thought about how each ring of that tree’s history were preserved in the rainbow rings in the bark. Crushed into the front bench seat, she thought about all the rings of her life pressing tighter and tighter together.

And in the Airstream, it had seemed only right -- it had seemed _safe_ and _good_ and _perfect_ \-- to make sure the two men she loved most in the world knew she loved them in the way she loved them. She loved Alex as a friend, platonically and deeply. Rosa had been lecturing her about the split attraction model, had been trying out identifying as ace and biromantic. Rosa had said something about how kissing could just feel good, it didn’t have to be about romance or sex; it could be about comfort and connection. And that felt right to her. She liked kissing Alex and he liked the comfort of her touch, had even told her so at the beginning of the road trip. It had been red letter day for him to say it, being a man who had to be pressed to acknowledge he lived in a human body on the best of days.

With Michael, it was entirely different. She loved touching him and how he looked when she touched him and how his hands felt on her and how he folded his big body around hers. And she loved watching him melt into Alex, loved seeing the hard lines of worry melt away from his body.

She loved Alex. She loved Michael. And for all they were different kinds of loves, they were still the same size in her heart.

So, sure, she’d started planning what kind of soapstone she’d be sneaking into Alex’s jacket pocket as they were all falling asleep -- that boy needed _softness_ and _smoothness_ and _something to work his nails into_ like nobody’s business -- but she wasn’t _surprised_ when he bolted the morning after. Too many feelings all at once was never going to be Alex’s jam. He needed to retreat, to reconsider, to figure out his _plan_. 

Once he was up, and Michael up to follow him, Maria lay back on the bed, folding the bleached white bedding around her, the light morning chill just enough to make her start looking around for her shirt. She leaned down, digging under the bed, sure she’d seen Michael stash it there, when her hand brushed something heavy that clinked. It felt like a small cardboard; but when she nudged it where she could see it, she saw it was lidless. The sides had been carefully wrapped in a smooth layer of duct tape; the top flaps cut off with a sharp knife and sanded smooth, until it was a nice enough box as you could get for free.

But it wasn’t the careful, thrifty construction of the box that had Maria pressing her hand to her chest, trying to control her racing heart.

It was te its contents.

The box was full of carefully set and protected stones, labeled with a fine-tipped black pen in Michael’s clean engineer’s hand.

> March 7 (?), 2008: white quartz, probably New Mexican  
>    
>  August 12 (?), 2008: sandstone, local to Roswell  
>    
>  July 30th, 2011: dino fossil, licked-did-not-stick  
>    
>  May 17th, 2015: metamorphic rock, local  
>    
>  June 15th, 2018: pumice, Texas 

And under the last label, there was a tiny, red, delicately drawn heart.

Maria’s jaw ached with how tightly she was clenching it to keep the tears at bay. She heard Michael coming back up the steps. She pulled the box into her lap, tracing her fingers gently over the stones. As Michael approached, she felt him stop, felt the air begin to move around them, like he was having to force himself not to use his powers to slip the box out of her hands. She held on tighter.

“Who taught you ‘licked-did-not-stick’” She asked, so she wouldn’t ask anything else.

“Mimi. She was showing me her rock collection in the back of the Pony, must have been, between the sandstone and the fossil, so, probably about 2009? She asked me to guess what I thought was a white rock was bone or fossil. I told her I didn’t know how to tell.” 

Maria finished the story: “Then she told you to lick it.”

MIchael nodded, soft curls bouncing as he shifted his weight in the narrow passage through the heart of the Airstream. “I thought it was going to be awful but it was, just --”

“Just dry, a little dusty, a little salty sometimes.” Maria nodded, smiling softly. “‘Of the earth.’” She took a breath: “I didn’t know you knew, about the crystals, the rocks.”

Michael held her eyes before dropping them, voice quiet: “Why do you think it was you I came to, after Caulfield, my Mom, Max, Noah, everything?” He lifted a corner of his mouth, something that was almost a smile, but not quite yet. “I figured, you’d been watching out for me that long, if I needed a place to find cover, to get some shelter, well, the Pony’s always been that for me.” He seemed to force himself to look up into her eyes. “You’ve always been there for me. And I’ve never said thank you, never --”

“None of that,” Maria said, reached out her hand, beckoning until he slipped his wrist between her fingers. She tugged him close, letting the warmth of his body move around her as he settled in beside her. “You’ve done your fair share of holding up the roof between your own two hands.” She tilted her head: “Without much of anyone noticing the weight you carry.” She tucked him closer against her, both of them sitting up against the wall that served as the headboard, shoulder-to-shoulder, the box balanced between their knees. “I know something about that.”

He tipped his head all the way back against the wall, rolling it back and forwards.

“Alex said being with us last night was like a circle of hell.”

Maria paused, considering that. “Can you tell me exactly what he said?”

Michael closed his eyes, voice tight: “‘If you had told me that I was going to have a threesome with my best friend and my first love, I would say ‘which circle of hell am I in?’” There was no small amount of pain in Michael’s voice, and a kind of baffled self-deprecation. 

Maria wanted to choose her words carefully: “Have you ever noticed, in all the long years you’ve known Alex, that he has a tragical case of foot-in-mouth disease when it comes to feelings?”

Michael cracked up, his body loosening against hers. 

“The first day we saw each other since he came back, he walked up to me at the reunion and asked if I was cooking meth.”

“Yikes.”

“I mean, once I cooled off, I got it: he was trying to protect me from the Air Force, and it really was a big deal, him violating protocol, telling someone he thought might be involved in a federal crime like drug manufacturing about the details of a case. Same thing, reopening Project Shepherd on his own to deal with the serial killer he thought he’d found, coming up with a lab for Liz to figure out a way to save Max, getting us into the operating theater to do the surgery. Like, that’s Alex’s love language: protective actions, not a lot of communication about them.”

“Oh, so you noticed that too?” Maria asked, smiling slightly. She took a breath. “And let me guess, he’s headed out, trying to get some space, probably said something unpleasant to make sure you _gave_ him the space he needed?”

Michael took a deep breath. His voice was quiet when he said: “I wish he wouldn’t do that. Last night was -- it was good. He didn’t have a word for it, and I spoke for him, and I shouldn’t have done that, but I did, and I told him I felt loved, and I wanted him to think he felt loved too, because that’s what _I_ was going for and --”

Maria tipped her head against his shoulder as he ran out of steam, feeling the easing of his breath through his lungs.

“I was thinking of giving him some soapstone,” she said, tracing her fingertips over the contents of the box in her lap. “Something smooth, something he could leave his mark on. Easy to carve. Get used to his actions having permanence, but in a form that takes him long enough to make an impression he has to really _mean_ it.”

“You think Alex isn’t intentional enough in his relationships?”  
  


Maria frowned a little. “I think he has a big heart. And a brilliant mind. And more courage than any two people should need for a lifetime. But I also think he’s had a lifetime of Grade A, A+ training courtesy of Jezebel Manes that he doesn’t deserve to get what he wants.”

Michael nearly whispered: “He said that too. At the reunion. ‘What I want doesn’t matter.’”

Maria buried her face in Michael’s shoulder, a wave of sadness for her best friend roiling across her shoulders and burying itself in her throat.

“So, I think Alex has some stuff to work out. He has to come to the conclusion he’s _allowed_ to want, and then he has to decide _what_ he wants, and then we -- you and I, both separately and together -- will need to decide _what_ we want and what we’re willing to do to get it.”

She traced her fingers over the stones. “But for right now, Alex is probably walking off the emotional hangover of feeling good for an extended period of time. I’ll check-in on him later, make sure he’s not doing anything ridiculous to reset his equilibrium.”

“Yeah?” Michael said, and the simple hope in that statement, like this was the first time he’d never thought he could share the weight of caring for Alex, of worrying for him, the life and lift and heaviness of needing him and needing to care for him and loving him. Of relying on him and wanting to be relied upon in return.

“Yeah,” Maria said. Then she put a bit of sternness in her voice, needing to make sure she was being crystal clear. “And so we’re on the same page, I’m not saying let’s jump into a poly relationship or saying anyone is going to marry anyone else. Not without a lot more talking. And nothing is going to change between me and Alex: he’s still my best friend. I still love him. But,” she paused a little. “But I think it might help you and I both to talk about what’s going on with us, and with him. To make sure, if something starts to change, if something comes down the track, we can see it coming before it hits both of us.” She smiled a little: “I got the sense you would have preferred a heads-up there was sex between the three of us in the offing last night.”

“Oh, hell no,” Michael laughed. Maria pulled away a little, cocking her head as she let him continue: “I would have wrapped myself around the axel and so would have Alex. “It’s just because we trust you with our lives that we could even make that happen. That and the near-death experience.”

“Nothing like holding the ones you love close to reaffirm that we all survived.” 

She pressed her thumb to that first bit of quartz in the box in her lap.

“What did you think these meant?”

“The stones?”

“Yeah.”

Michael made a little thinking sound. “Well, I didn’t know for a few years they would become a collection. I found the quartz in my sleeping bag, kept in my glove compartment. I found the sandstone when I moved the Airstream to get into the bunker, the first day I found it.” He shrugged a little. “I didn’t attribute a ton of specific meaning, other than that somebody -- and eventually I knew it was you -- was keeping an eye on me.” He gave a half-laugh. “That sense of being watched -- no, not watched. More like, observed? No,” he made a frustrated sound. 

“It felt like I was being held in someone’s heart. Like what it’s supposed to mean when someone says they’re ‘praying for you.’ And,” he plucked the bit of metamorphic rock out, voice getting slow and quiet: “I’d hold onto them. When things were bad. I’d hold onto them and think about all they’d seen, the millions of years they’d survived and figured -- I can get through this night. I can get through this, and the stones beneath my feet will still be here in the morning.”

Maria wanted to wrap his entire soul up with soft, warm cotton and just hold onto him until he had a chance to heal from all the bullshit that had flooded into his life. But she knew that wouldn’t help and he needed to breathe. 

Instead she said: “To me, the quartz meant I wanted you to see a way to get to a safer place. When you’re hungry and alone, it’s so hard to see more than to the next meal. So, I was trying to give you a little of my capacity to see, to plan. The sandstone was like you said, something for patience, for remembering that things take time to build and if you destroy yourself, you can’t get to the next layer. The dinosaur fossil, that was about birthdays.”

“What?” he laughed.

She nodded: “You skipped your party and my Mom had just forgotten mine, so it felt really, really important to me that you have something in your hands, a living thing, a formerly-breathing thing, that had lived in linear time and was still preserved. It’s easy to want to hold your breath, to just survive until the good part, but the thing is, if you hold your breath that long, you die. You need to keep living in between the good parts, and the bad parts, and the just-boring-everyday parts. So I wanted you to have something like that.”

Michael smiled: “And what do you think of the pumice?”

Maria pressed a kiss to the ball of his shoulder: “I think it means you’re just as much of a sap as I am. I’ve got a piece of that same stuff in my shower.”

Michael made an appreciative sound, almost a leer. “So you can think of me when you’re showering?” She could practically hear the waggling eyebrows.

She nudged his shoulder: “No, I use it to deal with my calluses.”

There was a pause, and she worried for a moment he might think that was like saying she thought of their first time in Texas like it was dirt she needed to clean off. So she said: “What I mean is, with how much I work, how much time I spend on my feet, my heels get hard. And it can be painful, if they rip or crack. So I use the pumice when I’m soft and warm, comfortable, to help me do what I need to, to be soft enough to keep doing what I need to do, to not let myself grow so many calluses that I can’t function in the world I want to live in.”

Michael breathed against her for a second, and then nodded slowly: “Thank you for explaining. I just keep mine here, and hold onto it sometimes when I’m thinking.”

“I like that,” Maria said. “I like that you kept them.” She pressed a kiss to his collarbone. “I like that you labeled them.” She pressed a kiss to the big vein in his neck, Michael tipping his head to the side to give her some space to work. “I like that they mean as much to you as they do to me.”

“You mean a lot to me.” Michael said, his voice moving against her lips. She smiled into his sunwarmed skin, murmuring: “I think you and I should get dressed, and then go and get some breakfast. Then I’ll check-in on Alex. And you and I can get dinner tonight at my place.”

He turned, pressing a kiss into her hair. “That sounds like a good plan.”

“Yeah,” Maria said. “And I think, after dinner, you and I can look up where to get Alex some soapstone. Together.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.” Maria took a deep breath. “I think it would be good for us, for all three of us.”

Michael took a long breath, breathing in her scent and carefully kissing the part in her hair. “If you think he’ll accept it.”

“That’s on him,” Maria said quietly. “We know what we have to offer. And we can tell him.” And then she gave Michael a sneaky smile as she moved to stand: “And rocks aren’t like relationships. He doesn’t need to agree for us to give him a stone that means something to us.”

Michael grinned, following her up and plucking her shirt from the back of the counter and handing it over. “So are we going to hide it in his glove compartment if he won’t accept it?”

“I was thinking in a flowerpot, so he can see it every time he comes home. A reminder that he has something to come home to.”

She heard Michael’s breath hitch a little and she turned, stepping into his arms, wrapping his arms around her and easing herself into the warm comfort of his body as he held onto her tight. “We’ll figure it out. I know we will. If magma can become mountains and seas become stones, we can figure out something that works for all of us.”

She felt Michael’s shoulders move as he took a long, hard breath. And then she felt him nod. “That makes sense.”

“Mom would call it ‘the wisdom of the earth,’” Maria started.

“At least where customers could hear.” Michael finished. 

Maria chuckled; there really was something to be said for dating someone who’d known her for so many layers of years.

She kept going: “Still, there’s a heart to it that’s true: there’s something about rocks, about how they form, how they’re changed, that gives us a kind of guide to how the world works.”

  
“I like it,” Michael reassured, “it certainly makes more sense to me than any religion ever has.”

“And we can expand it,” Maria said, beginning to carefully do-up Michael’s shirtfront buttons. “We know a lot about the geology of the stars. Maybe you can teach me about what they might mean, to you, to your people, to us.”

Michael reached down, cupping her cheek. “I’d like that.” He gave her a soft smile before leaning in to brush his lips against hers: “I like you.”

“I like you too, Michael Guerin,” Maria said. 

Then she finished the last button.

“Now, let’s go before Arturo’s out of pancakes.”

Michael turned and began to walk. Maria hung back for a long moment, looking at the box of stones where it sat a little crooked on the rumbled sheets. She reached back, carefully picking up the box and setting it down under the bed, tucked back and safe.

Then she stood, and followed Michael out into the daylight.

**Author's Note:**

> The Painted Desert and Petrified Forest are real places I've been to twice; they're amazing: https://www.nps.gov/pefo/index.htm
> 
> I wrote this while listening to this lovely playlist Tas recommended, compiled by cypresssun: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3wghp7pdjqQJUH5Exvl7Ry?si=c3bulsZUTpacARw3KhmHyA&utm_source=copy-link
> 
> Comments are life!


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